The Earth Spun Dizzy in Our Losing
by Angel of Harmony
Summary: Rictor, in the hours before the first issue of the current X Factor, finds himself alone and miserable in a bar in Mutant Town. RictorxOMC, established RictorxShatterstar.


**Title:** The Earth Spun Dizzy in our Losing  
**Feedback:** Any and all constructive criticism would be lovely, whether e-mailed or left in a review.  
**Disclaimer:** I don't own anything. 'Tis rather unfortunate.  
**Pairing:** Rictor/OMC, established Rictor/Shatterstar  
**Notes:** Based on the current run of X-Factor, by Peter David. This takes place in the hours before the first issue, and contains spoilers for that issue and for House of M.

**The Earth Spun Dizzy in Our Losing  
**_By Angel of Harmony/Harmony/Jen_

"_At first, we held  
Those furry stars and laughed:  
A snorting kind of song_

How the earth  
Spun dizzy in our losing"

_- _Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein, "Failure"

Rictor's only been in the bar for ten minutes when someone with an overdeveloped sense of accidental irony punches in Carol King's "I Feel the Earth Move" on the dusty corner jukebox. "_Dios mio_," he mutters into his rum and coke. "I hated this song even when I still _had_ my powers."

"You too, huh?" The man on the closest barstool swivels to face him. He's a young-ish guy, 30 at most, with close-cropped blonde hair and a look of pain in his eyes that clashes sadly with the fading smile lines at the corners of his lips. Rictor knows he's not talking about the song.

"It's most of us now, isn't it? Ninety percent or something? Whole fucking population turned into saps overnight." The words still feel harsh and unreal on his tongue, no matter how many times he's heard and said them.

The guy nods, taking a long swig from his beer bottle. "I'm John."

"Julio."

"So what was your… thing? Something to do with the earth, I'm guessing?" He jerks his head in the direction of the jukebox, and Rictor nods.

"I made earthquakes. Directed seismic energy through my fingers. It was more than that, but… it's hard to explain." He's not feeling particularly chatty, doesn't want to burden some stranger with the enormity of what he's going through, so he lets the explanation end there and takes another sip of his drink.

John seems to take that at face value as he nods, sympathetically. "For me, it was my eyes—they were like living cameras. I could record anything I saw – with audio, too – and replay it anytime I wanted, either in my head or on a wall or something, for other people to see."

He takes another drink of his beer, looks Ric up and down to see if he's actually paying attention, and, apparently satisfied, continues. "It was real good, you know? Nothing obvious, nothing that stopped me from living a normal life. And it made me a damn good cop."

Rictor looks up at that, surprised. "I was under the impression the police weren't too fond of mutants."

John shakes his head. "It's not that they don't like mutants – they just hate superheroes. Hell, how would you feel if a buncha guys in spandex came swoopin' in to do your job for you? I sure as hell can't blame 'em for getting cranky. But mutants on the force, taking beats and filing paperwork like everybody else and just using their powers to do a better job? They're not opposed to that."

Rictor shifts uncomfortably in his seat, glad that the man apparently doesn't recognize him from any of his own superheroing activities. John's point makes some sense, and Rictor's pretty sure he wouldn't have the energy to defend himself even if it didn't.

"Anyway, it doesn't matter now. I'm out on 'disability'." John laughs humorlessly. "Can you believe that? 'Disability.' At least the fucking NYPD knows what to call it."

"But can't you still…" Rictor ventures, but John cuts him off before he can finish the question, gesticulating wildly with his bottle.

"You don't get it. I worked undercover. I didn't look like a mutant, so no one ever suspected anything. They could search my whole damn body for bugs and cameras and they'd never find a thing, but I'd be recording everything they said and did. Once a judge said my vids were admissible evidence – after some court-appointed telepaths made sure they couldn't be tampered with – I was able to use my powers to take down all kinds of lowlifes. Hell, I single-handedly busted up the biggest drug ring the department's ever managed to get its hands on. But now? I'd have to go through all new training just to figure out how to do the job I've been doing for half my life. I'd have to learn how to hide a mic and point a secret camera in just the right direction, and even if I managed to do that half decently, I still wouldn't be able to get as close as I used to because of the chance that they'd find the equipment. It's never gonna be like it was." He finishes his beer and signals the bartender for another.

Rictor bites his lip, wanting to say something in reply, but he feels the fading vibrations of Carol King's piano under his barstool, a pathetic facsimile of the sensations that used to fill his every waking moment, and knows that any response could only be pathetic commiseration or gross hypocrisy.

But John was already in this bar before Rictor got here, and, if the five empty bottles in front of him are any indication, he's reached the point in his own drunken misery where an attentive audience is no longer his top priority. He continues talking, no longer really looking at Rictor at all, and though the words are only slightly slurred, the pain in his voice becomes more evident with every syllable.

"And you know what? That's not even the worst part. A job is just a job, right? But the thing is, I don't know how to… live, without my vids. My memory never worked the way other people's did. I'd keep vague recollections of things, sure, but I never bothered to memorize anything, or really try to mark down details. My eyes just did it for me, automatically, and I'd just watch what I needed to remember, whenever I needed it. But now? It's all gone."

He rubs a broad, callused hand over his head, breathing deeply, before he continues. "It's like… it's like losing every photo album and scrapbook and memento you've ever had. But it's more than that, because at least people who lose all those physical things still have the pictures in their heads. I've got nothing, now. Just tiny, vague memories of things that my brain keeps trying to bring into sharper focus, but it _can't_ anymore. I can't remember my little sister's graduation, or the day I got promoted to detective, or even the way my mom looked right before she died." He swallows a little at that, gripping the beer bottle more tightly, his eyes suddenly much older-looking than they have any right to be. "And when it comes to anything that happened after M-Day, after I lost the vids… it's just a big blank stretch of emptiness. I don't know how to… to _process_ things, like everyone else does. I just walk around in this daze, doing God only knows what, knowing I won't remember any of it the next day. I can't… focus. On anything."

Rictor knows he should say something at this point, but the only coherent idea in his head is that of escape: escape from this bar and this music and this story that is John's and Rictor's and everyone else's all at once. "You wanna get out of here?" he asks, putting a tentative hand on John's shoulder.

John nods. "My apartment is the next block over." They set down the cash for their drinks and make their way toward the door, John weaving visibly.

Rictor isn't sure why he's following this man. He could easily let him walk away, make his escape alone, draw into himself like he's always done and forget this drunken stranger with his sad tale that's both unique and familiar. But following John makes about as much sense as anything else Rictor's done in the past month, and he doesn't bother to over think it. Instead, as they walk in silence, Rictor turns his full attention to everything he doesn't feel in the ground beneath his feet. He watches John's lurching footsteps and knows, with painful clarity, exactly what vibrations he should be feeling through the pavement; his foot catches the edge of an anthill sticking up through a sidewalk crack and he cringes at just how much he doesn't feel the ants scattering away. There is no sensation anymore.

They reach John's apartment, a third floor walkup that's filled with dust and pizza boxes and miserable apathy. For a second, Rictor stands poised in the doorway, unsure of what to do – Go in and sit down? Say goodbye and leave? – but a second later John makes the decision for him by shutting the door, grabbing Rictor by the shoulders, and pressing a sloppy kiss to his lips.

The sex is quick, awkward, and passionless, but above all else desperate. It's the desperation of a forced connection, of commiseration, of two people searching fruitlessly to fill a void with something they each know the other doesn't have. It's also the first time Rictor has been with anyone since M-Day, and there's a quiet agony in knowing that this, too, has been muted with numbness. Without his powers he's floating, constantly floating, anchored to nothing, all sensations blunted by the severed connection to the earth's energies that had always been there before. He should feel the throbbing shift of tectonic plates when he comes, but instead there's just sticky heat and blank despair. He can't feel this and John won't remember it and it's all so meaningless that Rictor wants to scream.

Lying still, afterward, on the faded sheets of the bed of a man who has already forgotten his face, Rictor thinks of Shatterstar. He hasn't spoken to him since before M-Day. They'd been in different parts of the world, working with different teams, hardly ever seeing each other anyway, but Rictor knows that's just the defense he's made himself believe. Because 'Star _has_ called him a few times since then, leaving confused, worried voicemails on his phone that inevitably end with the words "I love you" in English or Spanish or Cadre or a mix of all three. But he doesn't know about the depowerment, and, when it comes down to blunt honesty, Rictor's scared – terrified that he'll find himself, like a Vietnam amputee, coming home to someone who can't bring himself to love half a person.

John is asleep, and Rictor takes the opportunity to climb out of the bed and make as graceful an exit as possible. He pulls on his pants and shoes with quiet haste, opens the apartment door, and descends the staircases to the street below. It's still early in the evening, and he sees all around him the signs of Mutant Town's new status quo. Behind the plate glass windows of restaurants, couples sit across from each other with beaming smiles, celebrating the loss of scaly skin or toxic gasses that formerly kept them isolated from human connection. But on the streets, stumbling along the cracked sidewalks, there are dozens of men and women just like him, walking in a fog, dazed and miserable, looking on with envy when one of the lucky ones zips by on gossamer wings, yellow eyes shining.

These people have not yet reached the level that John's at, the level of dusty pizza box piles and sad drunken ramblings to strangers in bars, but Rictor knows that it's what they're all destined to become. It's the destination that all of this leads to, the ultimate pathetic fate of a people forced, without warning, to become something they don't know how to be: completely ordinary. They are stuck in stasis, neither mutant nor human, unable to exist as either one, living half-lives as half-people in a shattered neighborhood of simultaneously shared and isolated misery.

And if that's his fate, Rictor thinks, perhaps it's better not to live as anything at all. Perhaps, he thinks, as he takes the elevator up to his own 10th floor apartment, it's better to live no life than a half life. Perhaps it's best to climb through his bedroom window, as he's doing right now, step out onto the windy ledge, and try to make the earth shake, one last time.


End file.
